On Sat, 23 Apr 2005, Sean wrote:> > Okay now you're just being difficult <g> You're acting like it's> impossible for git to grab the SHA1 out of the clear text message if there> is signing overhead above the tag reference. That is nonesense.

No. It's not "impossible" for git to parse crap. But git won't.

There are two ways you can write programs: - reliably - unreliably

and I do the first one. That means that a program I write does something _repeatable_. It does the same thing, regardless of whether a human happened to write "REF:" in the comment section, or anything else.

The thing is, great programs come not out of great coding, but out of great data structures. The whole git philosophy bases itself on getting the data structure right.

And what you are asking for is doing it _wrong_. So in git I don't justparse random free-form text and guess that a line that starts with REF: isa reference to a commit. It has very rigid and well-specified data structures, and that's how you make reliable programs.

I don't care what anybody else does on top of git, but dammit, I'll make sure that the core infrastructure is designed the right way.

And that means that we don't guess, and that we don't parse random ASCIIblobs. It means that we have very very fixed formats so that programs caneither do the right thing or unambiguously say "that's crap".

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: we have enough crap that calls itself SCM's out there already. I want git to be reliable and _simple_, not a collection of crap that just happens to work.